Review: Tracy Featherstone and Krista Connerly/Woman Made Gallery

The play’s the thing for Tracy Featherstone and Krista Connerly, even though they claim to intend their color photographs of bodies sporting their sculptural and sartorial adornments to pack the message that we should live in a more “connected world” that replaces “rationality with sensuality, and isolation with relationship.” We are back in high school when we see their “Rootpack” series in which Featherstone, decked out in old-fashioned rural garb, stands in a verdant backyard modeling a backpack-like contraption of roughly woven branches that promises the wearer “extra connection and nutrition” from its virtue of “transmitting and/or absorbing molecules” from the environment. The rootpack itself—festooned with babies’ panties—is on display, beckoning us to try it on for size and effect, but it is, after all, in a gallery and looks a bit fragile. Are Featherstone and Connerly New Age super-believers or sassy teenagers at heart? (Michael Weinstein)